PIANOFORTE with eight steps or keys in the octave, which included the 15 Hat and the R natural, as in Guide s scale, were long preserved, for Pnetorius speaks of them as still existing nearly two hundred years later. This diatonic keyboard, ve learn from Sebastian Virdung (Musica getutscht und auszgezogen, Basel, 1511), was the keyboard of the early clavichord. We reproduce his diagram as the only autho rity we have for the disposition of the one short key. I FIG. 2. Diatonic Clavichord Keyboard (Guido s Scale) froinVirdung. Before 1511. The extent of this scale is exactly Guido s. Virdung s diagram of the chromatic is the same as our own familiar keyboard, and comprises three octaves and a note, from F below the bass stave to G above the treble. But Virdung tells us that even then clavichords were made longer than four octaves by repetition of the same order of keys. The introduction of the chromatic order he attributes to the study of Boetius, and the consequent endeavour to restore the three musical genera of the Greeks the diatonic, chro matic, and enharmonic. But the last-named had not been attained. Virdung gives woodcuts of the clavicordium, the virginal, the clavicimbalum, and the claviciterium. We reproduce three of them (figs. 3, 6, and 12), omitting the virginal as obviously incorrect. All these drawings have been continually repeated by writers on musical instru ments up to the present day, but without discerning that in the printing they are reversed, which puts the keyboards entirely wrong, and that in Luscinius s Latin translation of Virdung (Musurgia, sive Praxis Musicx, Strasburg, 1536), which has been hitherto chiely followed, two of the engrav ings, the clavicimbalum and the claviciterium, are trans posed, another cause of error. Martin Agricola (Musica fnstrumentalis, Wittenberg, 1529) has copied Virdung s illustrations with some differences of perspective, and the addition, here and there, of errors of his own. Fin. :!. Virdung s Clavichordium, 1011; reversed facsimile. Still vulgarly known as monochord, Virdung s clavi chord was really a box of monochords, all the strings being of the same length. He derives the clavichord from Guido s rnonochord as he does the virginal from the psaltery, but, at the same time, confesses he does not know when, or by whom, either instrument was invented. We observe in this drawing the short sound-board, which always remained a clavichord peculiarity, and the straight sound board bridge necessarily so when all the strings were of one length. To gain an angle of striking place for the tangents against the strings the keys were made crooked, an expedient further rendered necessary by the " fretting, "- three tangents, according to Virdung, being directed to stop as many notes from each single group of three strings tuned in unison ; each tangent thus made a different vibrating length of string. In the drawing the strings are merely indicated. The German for fret is Bund, and such a clavichord, in that language, is known as a " gebunderi " one, both fret (to rub) and Jiund (from Irinden, to bind) having been taken over from the lute or viol. The French and Italians employ touche " and " tasto," touch. Prse- torius, who wrote a hundred years later than Virdung, says two, three, and four tangents were thus employed in stopping. The oldest clavichords extant have no more than two tangents to a note formed by a pair of strings, no longer three. Thus seven pairs of strings suffice for an octave of twelve keys, the open notes being F, G, A, B rlat, C, D, E flat, and by an unexplained peculiarity, perhaps derived from some special estimation of the notes which was connected with the church modes, A and D are left throughout free from a second tangent. A corresponding value of these notes is shown by their independence of chromatic alteration in tuning the double Irish harp, as explained by Galilei in his treatise on music, published in 1581. Adlung, who died in 1762, speaks of another fretting, but we think it must have been an adaptation to the modern major scale, the " free " notes being E and B. Clavichords were made with double fretting up to about the year 1700, that is to say, to the epoch of J. S. Bach, who, taking advantage of its abolition and the conse quent use of independent pairs of strings for each note, was enabled to tune in all keys equally, which had been impossible so long as the fretting was maintained. The modern scales having become established, Bach was now able to produce, in 1722, D is wohltemperirte Clavier, the first collection of preludes and fugues in all the twenty- four major .and minor scales for a clavichord which was tuned, as to concordance and dissonance, fairly equal. The oldest clavichord, here called manicordo (as French, manicorde, from monochord), known to exist is that shown in fig. 4. It will be observed that the lowest octave is FIG. 4. Manicordo (Clavichord) d Eleonora dl Montalvo, 1659 ; Kraus Museum, Florence. here already " bunclfrei " or fret-free. The strings are no longer of equal length, and there are three bridges, divi sions of the one bridge, in different positions on the sound-board. Mersenne s " manicorde " (Harmonic Universelle, 1636), shown in an engraving in that work, has the strings still nearly of equal length, but divides the sound-board bridge into five. The fretted clavichords made in Germany in the last years of the 17th century have the curved sound-board bridge, like a spinet. In the clavichord the tangents always form the second bridge, indispensable for the vibration, as well as act as the sound exciters (tig. 5). The common damper to all the strings is a list of cloth, interwoven behind the tangents. As the tangents quitted the strings the cloth immediately
Fi<;. ;">. Clavichord Tangent.